


The Stolen Priestess

by orphan_account



Category: Inhumans, Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, F/M, Greek and Roman Mythology - Freeform, Roman Mythology AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 22:41:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1405195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A reimagining of the tale of Medusa and Black Bolt's union, told in the style of, and to great extent fused with, ancient Roman mythology. </p><p>Based on a prompt given by wintersoldierofourdiscontent: Black Bolt/Medusa, classical deities AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stolen Priestess

Being descendants of Terra and Ocean, Medusa and her sisters were, by all rights, the fruit of the Earth’s loins, but Medusa most of all, for her grace and her beauty, as well as her unwavering passion, was greatly treasured by both Jupiter and Minerva from among this fairest line of mortals. So it was that she entered into and rose within the ranks of the Cult of Minerva to become a priestess, taking all vows of celibacy and devotion thereof. But the scheming Maximus, a prince of the race of changeling gods, long since banished to the middle realm of Attilan that rose above the Earth but not so high as Mount Olympus and its deities, caught sight of the fair mortal maiden and couldn’t look away from the burnished glory of her fine red hair shining in the sun. Ever greedy, and knowing not his place in the hierarchy of mortals and immortals, he stole into the Temple of Minerva in the dead of night and whisked the fair Medusa away for his own.

 

By and by, Minerva felt the loss of her most beloved priestess and began to seek her out together with her husband Jupiter. Maximus, accustomed to keeping one ear bent on the whisperings of rumor and suspicion in all the lands through which he dragged his unwilling captive, learned of their search and redoubled his efforts to seduce the lovely Medusa with his cunning and his ambition, by turns tempting and threatening her with the secret and greatly powerful magic mist he claimed to possess, which could unlock unthinkable alterations in form and bring forth fantastical changes in function within even the most seemingly mundane of mortals. But Medusa’s will proved immovable, her determination forged of purest steel, and so Maximus withered under her steadfastness and grew to hate his stolen beauty, the fairest fruit of the earth whom he had tried and failed to possess.

And so, knowing that his time had run short and that the Olympians were hard upon his heels, Maximus loosed his secret—not the true Terrigen mist, but an impostor formula that made its victims susceptible to powerful spells of illusion — upon Medusa while the maiden slept, and she awoke seemingly stripped of all her beauty and rendered monstrous. Her famed russet waves of hair were now become a seething abomination of serpents, her once sea-clear eyes now clouded grey and rife with tangled veins so heinous as to freeze men in their tracks with loathing.

When they were inevitably discovered by Minerva and Jupiter, the devious changeling prince, being at his heart a coward and a traitor, lied to the great goddess, telling her that Medusa had bewitched him with her beauty and led him astray, drawing him down beyond the boundaries of Attilan and into the confounding mortal world with all its temptations and its perils. Further, he told Minerva, as Jupiter looked upon him with a fierce intensity, that in his confusion he had lain with the fair maiden upon her insistence and thereafter, having recognized her lust for a trap, had enacted the legendary Terrigenesis upon her in self-defense, hoping to escape from the spell of her seduction as she was changed.

Furious at the betrayal, Minerva demanded answers of her besmirched and defiled priestess, but Medusa remained too devastated by her own terrible transformation to utter even so much as a word in her own defense. As punishment, Minerva stole away Maximus’ sanity and forbade him reentry into the land of Attilan, leaving him mad and alone to wander the mortal world for the rest of his days; for Medusa, she could devise no punishment more fearsome that what she saw that the Terrigenesis had already wrought, save to cast her out from the company of her fellow humans forevermore, or else risk turning them to stone through the sheer horror of looking upon her visage.

Yet neither the Olympians in their outrage, nor Maximus in his wickedness, had counted upon the foresight of the ever-watchful King of Attilan, who had long ago learned never to let his brother out of his sight nor to turn a blind eye to the constantly threatened borders of his island kingdom. He called upon his sometime ally and compatriot, the Sorcerer Supreme, whose sworn duty was to protect the mortal realm, and asked of him a favor in repayment for age-old debts. Thus the mage gave King Blackagar access to the Eye of Agamotto, which allowed him not just to see across great distances, but also to look beyond disguises and illusions.

What he saw made the king’s blood run cold. At once, he found the beast Tetanus, who bore him great affection and served him and all his royal entourage with inimitable loyalty, and used its powers to navigate himself to the lost and barren lands where his mad brother Maximus now wandered. There he found the great Olympian royals just before their return to the heights of the gods, and he beseeched them with the keenest sincerity to allow his brother safe passage back to the island kingdom of Attilan, arguing that now, without the faculties of his mind, Maximus could, with all the boundless abandon of insanity, exact even greater dangers upon the Olympians’ beloved mortals than they could possibly realize.

The king’s words dripped like sweetest honey from his tongue, undeniably persuasive, and though Minerva was affronted by the boldness of his request, Jupiter was struck by the Attilan king’s perseverance, and so, against Minerva’s wishes, he granted Blackagar’s request. So it was that Blackagar ushered Maximus the Mad back inside the gates of his kingdom, where he locked his brother deep inside the bowels of the court where he could bring harm to neither mortals nor his fellow changelings. That Blackagar had managed this was scarcely to be believed. Indeed, the great goddess Minerva had, with narrowed eyes that flashed flinty and severe in the earthly sunlight, issued an edict that Blackagar should never again cross into the land of mortals in exchange for having been granted his near-heretical request. 

But sometimes, even the laws of the greatest gods must be broken.

Blackagar could not forget what the Eye had revealed to him beneath the illusion Maximus’ evil poison had wrought upon Medusa; not the alacrity of her fair gaze, nor the supple shimmering spill of red hair over the soft curve of her breasts, nor the absolute conviction with which she had held fast against Maximus’ vain petitioning. Despite the peril of disobeying Minerva’s rule, the King of Attilan could not resist stealing back to earth once more in search of the lovely Medusa. He tracked her across the islands of the Aegean and eastward, into the lands of the sheiks and imams, then south into the hot dry expanse of Africa, where villagers sometimes told him in fearful whispers of having sighted a monstrous witch on the fringes of their lands, mouth frothing with necromantic acid as infant serpents dropping in writhing trails from her unholy head to infiltrate their homes and scourge their children.

All this was mere imagination at work, the potency of Maximus’ impostor formula made manifest, and so Blackagar was not dissuaded in his quest. When at last he came upon Medusa, she railed against him, hissing and darting and hurling stones out of fear for being slain at last, though she could not understand why he did not freeze at the very sight of her.

Instead, he simply endured her short-lived onslaught, and then, when she was ragged with exhaustion and too befuddled to aggress upon him any longer, he spoke, using all the Mist-enhanced power inherent in his voice to draw her down from the edge of her rancor. Finally she understood that he meant her no harm and, in fact, saw nothing in her of the monster she believed herself to have become. So overwhelming was her relief and so depthful her gratitude that she found within herself the power of speech once more, and so unleashed the flood of confession that was her side of the tale she had, to her greatest shame, been unable to tell her utmost deity, Minerva. The spell of illusion fell away from her more fully with every moment she spent under the King of Attilan’s adoring gaze, and to him she seemed to increase in appeal with every unfettered word she spoke, until all either of them could see in the world was each other and the light of burgeoning love as it shone ever brighter between them, uniting them as surely as the sacred vows of marriage.

Yet Minerva was not to be underestimated in the power of her fury nor in the surety of her vengeance, and once she discovered that the bold king had disobeyed her commandment never again to walk amongst her treasured mortals — once, moreover, she discovered that he had seen fit to pursue the very priestess she’d once held in highest regard — she seethed with rage and would not be dissuaded from her retribution. Only upon the urging of her husband Jupiter did she stay her hand from killing the both of them dead right then and there; instead, she robbed Blackagar of his finest and most useful weapon, the power of his voice and all the persuasiveness and commanding potential it possessed. As for Medusa, she took pity on the fair maiden, having intimated that Maximus had played her for a fool and made her look a villain rather than the victim of his forked tongue, and allowed her to proceed with the king back to his island kingdom without intervention, though jealously she hoped that perhaps the couple would fade into dysfunction and then oblivion. After all, how could a king possibly rule his people with no voice to govern and no ability to speak to or for them?

Medusa, though, was likewise not to be underestimated. Married now to Blackagar and thus the queen of the changeling gods, she rose to the challenge of her new position with fearless aplomb, as devoted now to her mute yet benevolent spouse as she had ever been to the flighty goddess Minerva. So great was the bond of intimacy and understanding between herself and her lover that she learned to interpret his thoughts, and he to trust her tongue to say for him what he could not with all due nuance and discretion. Together they ushered the Kingdom of Attilan into a golden age of peace and harmony, and were much-beloved rulers to all their widely diverse subjects for many sweet and uninterruptedly fruitful years.

Maximus, however, grew not less but ever more mad in his isolation and his resentment, and though the fury of Minerva had robbed him of all capacity for logic, it had not decreased by the slightest degree his mind’s ability to plot and scheme, to machinate in the darkness, to attune itself with the fiercest, most targeted intensity to even the slightest, vaguest whisperings of unrest as they filtered through the bowels of the castle. While Medusa and Blackagar ruled, Maximus the Mad grinned and babbled and paced about in his cell, the perfect picture of obliviousness, but all the while, his danger to the king and queen and all they held dear honed itself into something murderously sharp and purposeful…


End file.
